The Big Idea Book

Like the best schemes, Robert Jones' big idea is essentially simple: "The things people buy--products and services--are becoming more and more similar as it becomes increasingly easy for one company to copy another's technological advantage. This has a simple but devastating consequence: in the absence of economic differences, emotional logic will become the single most important business driver". That sofa you bought isn't just something to sit on while you watch the TV, it's a concept: a bundle of emotional cues and value statements representing your core beliefs.Sound familiar? Stick with it, Jones' thinking is intuitive and definitions do blur, but his "big ideas" are distinct from brands or organisational vision.What organisations started to look for [at the end of the 1990s] was something deeper than brand. Something that, unlike product idea or business model, would be rich and serious. And something that, unlike vision or brand, would appeal to people inside and outside the organisation equally: something they could share. And that's the crux of it. Big ideas are the promises businesses communicate about themselves totally, both internally to their employees and externally to their customers and shareholders. A big idea says, "this is what we stand for, join us if you share our ideals". Jones offers insight into how big ideas emerge and the active, organic way they are defined and shaped by products and responses. "The journey to discover a big idea is a strange experience", he says, "very rarely do organisations get straight there".Robert Jones has written a wonderful book, packed with insight and bursting with energy, vision and inspiration. The Big Idea joins Beautiful Corporations and Corporate Religion in having explored the new intimacies of the organisational space and effectively vocalised the power of emotion. --Iain CampbellRead More